Design a Custom Geofilter from Your Phone!

Each day, Snapchatters submit tens of thousands of Geofilter designs for their engagements and weddings, parties, vacations, graduations, and so much more.

Starting today, we’re making it easier to design a custom Snapchat filter! Snapchatters can now create filters right in the Snapchat app, and customize them with many of the same Creative Tools available to decorate Snaps!

To get started, simply tap “On-Demand Geofilters” in Settings to check out our all-new mobile creative studio. From there, you can pick a theme for your filter and add personal flair with text, Bitmojis, and Stickers.

Once your masterpiece is complete, choose where you’d like your filter to appear and when. Your Geofilter can cover an event or entire block — for an hour or up to ninety days. Pricing starts at $5.99. You’ll hear from Snapchat when your Geofilter is approved to confirm payment and details.

A Whole New Story

Today we’re announcing a new way to create custom Stories – about anything, with any of your friends, even for a specific location! It's perfect for a trip, a birthday party, or a new baby story just for the family.

You decide who can add to the Story and who can view it – you can also choose to Geofence the Story to a location.

It’s super easy to create a new Story. Simply tap the “Create Story” icon located in the top right corner of the Stories page.

Stories disappear if no one has contributed to them in the past 24 hours.

Limitless Snaps

Today we’re making a pretty big change to the way you create and send Snaps. We’re reorganizing the layout of our creative tools, adding a Magic Eraser (you’ll find this under the Scissor tool), and adding a new setting to the timer: infinity!

We’ve all felt the frustration of not being able to fully enjoy a Snap – even after replaying it – and we wanted to give you the option of allowing the recipient to enjoy your Snap as long as they’d like. After your friend finishes viewing the Snap and taps to close it, it will delete as usual.

There’s also a new Loop tool for videos so you can decide if your Snap plays once or loops until your friend is ready to tap to the next Snap.

These changes allow us to continue evolving the Snapchat service and provide a foundation for introducing even more creative tools for making fun Snaps! We hope you enjoy it!

Introducing New World Lenses

We launched Lenses over a year ago as a whole new way to express ourselves on Snapchat. Since then, we've become puppies, puked rainbows, face-swapped with our best friends — and begun to explore how Lenses can change the world around us.

Today, we’re adding new ways to use Lenses.

While Snapping with the rear-facing camera, simply tap the camera screen to find new Lenses that can paint the world around you with new 3D experiences!

A Story for Everything

Since we launched Stories in October 2013, Stories have evolved from singular, personal perspectives to include collective narratives created by our entire community with Snaps submitted to Our Story and curated by our team.

Our Stories have provided behind the scenes Snaps from interesting events all around the world — from the field of the Super Bowl to the summit of Mount Everest! Over time, the number of Snaps that were created by our community and added to Our Story simply overwhelmed our curation team — and inspired us to create something new.

We’ve built a new way to understand what’s happening in Snaps that are submitted to Our Story, and to create new Stories using advanced machine learning. The results have been amazing: you can search over one million unique Stories on Snapchat!

In addition to our professionally curated Stories, you can watch a local basketball game, check out the scene at your favorite bar, view your favorite Fashion Week shows, get inspired by a faraway place, or simply tap through a Story full of puppies — there’s a Story for everything!

The best part of Stories is seeing the world through the eyes of our community. It’s easy to add your point of view — simply take a Snap and add it to Our Story! You might see it included in relevant Stories depending on what you’re Snapping.

We’re rolling out Stories in Search starting today in select cities and we hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

International Growth

Today, the media reported that we selected London as our International HQ. That is not true. We have one HQ, in Venice, and many offices throughout the world.

We did, however, make a change to the way we operate our business in London. Going forward, we will bill our advertising revenue from the U.K. (and a few other countries) through a U.K. entity. This allows us to pay taxes in the U.K., which we believe is part of being a good local partner as we grow our business.

We want to pay taxes in the countries where we sell advertising, and this is an important step in building the infrastructure to achieve that goal.

Happy Holidays!

The holidays are a great time to hang out with friends and spend time with family – it’s always better together! We couldn’t think of a better time to announce Groups, a new way to communicate with up to 16 friends on Snapchat.

Groups can be created while sending a Snap, or when you’re making a new Chat. When your friends are present in a Group Chat, we show their name at the bottom of the Chat. Simply tap their name to start a 1:1 Chat, and then easily return to the Group in one swipe! We call this Quick Chat, and it’s the fastest way to keep the conversation going with one friend without spamming the entire Group.

Chats sent to a Group are deleted by default after 24 hours. Snaps sent to a Group can be opened and replayed just once by each recipient. If a Snap isn't opened, it's deleted after 24 hours, just like Chats.

We’ve also introduced two new Creative Tools – Scissors and Paintbrush. Use Scissors to cut out part of a Snap on the Preview Screen to turn it into a sticker! The Paintbrush can be applied to Snaps in Memories, and turns a Snap into an artistic masterpiece!

We’re so grateful for your support. Thank you for another terrific year – we love building products for all of you! Wishing you a wonderful 2017.

Story Playlist

When we first built Auto Advance we wanted to make it easier to catch up with your friends by playing all of your Stories in recent updates back-to-back.

Unfortunately, this change made it impossible to individually choose which Story to watch. Sometimes we just want to see what our close friends or family are up to – not all of our friends – and Auto Advance prevented that.

Starting today for select Snapchatters in our Android community and rolling out soon across all Android and iOS, the Auto Advance feature will be removed to give you control of your Story viewing experience once again!

Simply tap on a Story to view it. We won’t automatically advance you to the next Story in recent updates.

We haven’t given up entirely on this idea of making it easier to catch up with friends – so we took what we learned from Auto Advance and built Story Playlist.

Story Playlist is an easy way to select the Stories you want to watch and seamlessly view them full screen in the order you selected them.

Tap on the Story thumbnail to the left of your friend’s name to add their Story to your playlist. Hit the play button at the bottom of the screen to watch!

Introducing Spectacles!

We’ve been working for the past few years to develop a totally new type of camera. We call it Spectacles!

Imagine one of your favorite memories. What if you could go back and see that memory the way you experienced it? That’s why we built Spectacles.

Spectacles are sunglasses with an integrated video camera that makes it easy to create Memories.

We’ve created one of the smallest wireless video cameras in the world, capable of taking a day’s worth of Snaps on a single charge, and we integrated it seamlessly into a fun pair of sunglasses – available in 3 different colors!